Twango

» see twango.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

i missed twango entirely on the way past. it was a small seattle area photo and video sharing site that ran for three years on its own before nokia bought it in july 2007. i was on flickr and on the early generation of free image hosts in turkey at the time, and the redmond-built twango never crossed into any of my browser tabs. it was a competent product without a viral moment, which is the failure mode that ends in an acquisition rather than a shutdown.

the founders were five ex-microsoft people. jim laurel led the engineering side with his brother michael. philip carmichael ran product while randy kerr and serena glover filled out the early team. they built it as a multimedia library service rather than a photo-only site, which made it different from flickr or photobucket on paper. you could upload photos, audio clips, short videos or even pdf documents into the same gallery. the free tier capped you at 250 megabytes a month after the launch, which was a lot in 2004 but stopped being a lot quickly.

nokia bought the company in july 2007 for an undisclosed sum, brought the team into the consumer software division, and rebranded twango as share on ovi in february 2008. it became part of the ovi suite alongside ovi mail and ovi maps. that was the moment the brand functionally died for anyone who had known the original site. the codebase kept running under the ovi label for another four years.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the breakout ~

the original twango pitch was the everything-bucket approach. flickr was already the brand name in photo sharing in 2005 and 2006, photobucket was the embed-everywhere image host of myspace, youtube was the video site. twango sat in the middle of those three, betting that people wanted a single library for all of it rather than three separate accounts. that bet did not pay off as a standalone business but it made the company an obvious acquisition target for a phone maker that needed a media backend for the symbian camera-phone generation it was shipping in europe and asia.

~ how it actually ended ~

nokia announced the closure on march 7, 2012, gave users a 12 week migration window, and pulled the plug on may 30, 2012. by then the ovi store and ovi share and most of the rest of the ovi brand were being collapsed into nokia's broader retreat from its own services platform under stephen elop. elop had announced the windows phone pivot in the burning platforms memo in february 2011. ovi share was one of the smaller items on the wind-down list. the original twango brand had been gone for four years by that point, the closure read in english as a footnote inside a different company's transition.

~ what got buried with it ~

the multimedia library idea outlived the product but never quite found a winner. dropbox and google drive ended up doing the everything-bucket job a few years later for file storage. icloud photo library and google photos took over the photo and video side. the specific twango pattern of one gallery view across photos plus audio plus pdfs did not survive the transition into the smartphone era, where each media type ended up living inside its own dedicated app instead of a single uploader.

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